HIS (0136) 286 - The History of Modern Brazil: From Artists to Activists

Foundational Knowledge: Students will be able to identify and explain key debates in Brazilian historiography, especially with regards to the following:

Unit 1, Amnesia: Identify why primary sources in the period before 1808 are scant, misleading, or have been intentionally destroyed.
Unit 2, Physiology: Explain the rise of political alliances and the shifts in the plantation economy in the 19th century. Define terms such as centralization, paternalism, casa vs rua.
Unit 3, Psychology: Identify changes in democracy and political organization in the first half of the twentieth century. Explain the connection b/w modernization and nationalism. 
Unit 4, Consciousness: Highlight key transformations of approaches to resistance and activism in the second half of the twentieth century and connect these transformations to large international projects. These international projects include the Green Revolution, the role of International Financial Institutions in the wake of Bretton Woods conference, the surge of bureaucratic authoritarianism, Cold War geopolitics, dependence on petroleum, and the onset of neoliberal market policies, including WTO trade policies and Structural Adjustment Packages in the wake of the Washington Consensus.
The Politics of Art  (Aesthetic Engagement):

Application:

Apply analytical concepts of composition, symbolism, color, form, and narrative to multiple genres and art forms. 
Explain, with evidence, how visual and aural renderings of the world make claims on truth, and then find details that reveal manipulations and distortions.
Distinguish how artistic projects have been co-opted, commodified, or re-situated in ways that change early narratives.
Ways of Knowing  (Ethics and Epistemologies):

Recognize the consequence of political institutions and plantation slavery on ordering the social world (casa vs rua), religious cosmologies, and everyday language.
Point to Brazilian philosophers and poets who have stressed the centrality of the arts and an aesthetic education in building citizens, then in promoting nationalism, and ultimately in achieving self-awareness and making political activism effective and meaningful.
Encounter pedagogy strategies set forth by Brazilian activists (Freire, Boal, Schwade) and recognize how our class itself has already implemented many of them. Connect these strategies with the resulting knowledge gained and relationships built in the class, and compare/contrast these gains with other classroom experiences.